RESTful_ACL

A Ruby on Rails plugin that provides fine grained access control through the MVC stack to RESTful resources in a Ruby on Rails 2.0+ application. Authorization is as simple as true or false.

What it does

RESTful_ACL is a simple Access Control Layer for Ruby on Rails. It restricts access on a fine-grained level to any RESTful MVC stack. Every application is different and everyone likes to setup their User / Account / Role resources differently; this plugin will allow you to do your thing and keep that thing locked down.

Requirements

RESTful_ACL requires the super amazing RESTful_Authentication plugin.

How to Install

Install the RESTful_ACL gem:

sudo gem install mdarby-restful_acl -s http://gems.github.com

Add the gem to your environment.rb file as thus:

config.gem 

RESTful_ACL requires two named routes: “error” and “denied”. Add the following to your routes.rb file:

  map.error 

How to Use

Controllers

Add before_filter :has_permission? into any controller that you’d like to restrict access to (or application_controller.rb for your entire app).

Models

Define a parent resource (if one exists) by using the logical_parent method, and define the following five methods in the model of every resource you’d like to restrict access to. The five methods can contain anything you’d like so long as they return a boolean true or false. This allows you to define your User’s roles any way you wish.

  class Issue < ActiveRecord::Base
    logical_parent :some_model_name
    
    # This method checks permissions for the :index action
    def self.is_indexable_by(user, parent = nil)
      
    end

    # This method checks permissions for the :create and :new action
    def self.is_creatable_by(user, parent = nil)

    end

    # This method checks permissions for the :show action
    def is_readable_by(user, parent = nil)

    end

    # This method checks permissions for the :update and :edit action
    def is_updatable_by(user, parent = nil)

    end

    # This method checks permissions for the :destroy action
    def is_deletable_by(user, parent = nil)

    end
  end

View Helpers

There are five view helpers also included in RESTful_ACL: #indexable, #creatable, #readable, #updatable, and #deletable. These enable you to do nifty things like:

  <%= link_to ‘Foo Index’, foos_path if indexable <span>>
  <</span>= link_to 

Huh? Here’s an example

Let’s say that you have two resources: Project and Issue. A Project has many Issues, an Issue belongs to a Project. I’d like to make sure that the current user is a member of the Project before they can create a new Issue in that Project:

  class Issue < ActiveRecord::Base
    logical_parent :project
    
    belongs_to :author
    belongs_to :project

    def self.is_indexable_by(user, parent = nil)
      user.projects.include?(parent)
    end
  
    def self.is_creatable_by(user, parent = nil)
      user.projects.include?(parent)
    end
  
    def is_updatable_by(user, parent = nil)
      user == author && parent.is_active?
    end

    def is_deletable_by(user, parent = nil)
      user == author
    end

    def is_readable_by(user, parent = nil)
      user.projects.include?(parent)
    end
  end

Admins RULE!

RESTful_ACL grants global access to all actions to site administrators. To enable this, make sure that your User model defines an is_admin? method and/or an is_admin attribute. If the current_user.is_admin? returns true, access will be granted automatically.

How to Test

I normally do something along these lines in RSpec:

  describe 

Caveats

RESTful_ACL doesn’t work with nested singleton resources. Wha? Yeah. Those are things in routes.rb like:

  # Note the singular forms in 'user.resource :profile'
  map.resources :users do |user|
    user.resource :profile
  end

In these situations I normally skip permission checking altogether as a Profile will always be mapped to the currently logged in User, regardless of the params[:user_id] passed in. You don’t trust those either right? Good.

Help

Add a ticket to RESTful_ACL’s Lighthouse Account

About the Author

My name is Matt Darby. I’m an IT Manager and pro-web-dev at for Dynamix Engineering and hold a Master’s Degree in Computer Science from Franklin University in sunny Columbus, OH.

Feel free to check out my blog or recommend me